Kirstowsky, Mary Grace

ORAL HISTORY OF MARY GRACE KIRSTOWSKY
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
February 27, 2003
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Mary Grace, let���s start by beginning to have you tell us how and why you came to Oak Ridge, I presume, from Mississippi, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I did. I was living in Clarksdale, Mississippi but attending Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi. Carbide sent a Mr. Kolb down to interview the seniors that year and they talked a little bit about the project and I decided to come here along with about three other ladies from that school too.
Mr. Kolb: Who were they?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: [inaudible] Keysler and Martha Coates and Jo Mason. I expected to be a school teacher. However, both my brothers were in the service, and although I had lost my father when I was very young, mother insisted on my learning to make a living. I thought since I was only twenty years old, it would be nice to come up here during the war and do what I could, if anything, and then get back into teaching. I never did that because I enjoyed it up here, and maybe it would have been [inaudible] a teacher but I doubt it.
Mr. Kolb: What happened when you got to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: When I got to Oak Ridge, I lived in a dormitory.
Mr. Kolb: I mean before; tell us the experience of coming to Oak Ridge. Where did you go, to Knoxville?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I went to Knoxville. I stayed there in a hotel and was interviewed. They had an office in Knoxville that sort of screened out the applicants, and then I came out, came out here, I don’t know, on some sort of [inaudible] they had and went to K-25 and was picked up right away. They were hiring a lot of people then, almost anybody with a warm body.
Mr. Kolb: And what was your first job?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: My first job, I was approached down in the employment office by a lady, Sally Samahoff from New York. She worked with Carl Babcock who was, I think, in charge of keeping equipment, registering equipment and all that stuff, and I stayed with him for just a very little while. There was another fellow that came in who was an architect from Arkansas and he was kind of a colorful character. He wore spats and a bowler hat and carried a cane.
Mr. Kolb: During work?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, well yeah, that��s the way he was dressed all the time. I worked for him for a little while and then they transferred me to an assistant division head who was Ibe Deck. He was a [inaudible] quite a colorful character and a great mind. But you remember that this was staffed by some of the best people all over the country. He was one of them, and I think he really knew an awful lot about barrier, for instance. Then he was succeeded by Bill Humes who was a Harvard Engineer. You remember him. He was succeeded very well and went on to the New York office, and because there was a little bit of jealously between Ibe Deck and Humes, my former boss decided to send me over to a division head to work because he didn’t particularly like Humes. I would [have] loved to have stayed with him. I worked for him for a little while and he was a wonderful boss. Then I worked for a division head, Art Dunlap, who was in safety and protection, and he was succeeded by Baylor, and I worked for him quite a long time and he became Assistant Plant Manager out there. I continued to work for him and then I worked for the Plant Manager, Paul Huber, and when Emlette’s secretary, who was over the three plants, left, they moved me into that slot and I worked for him until he left here. He was succeeded by Johnny Murray.
Mr. Kolb: Excuse me. Huber, what time period was that, approximately?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That was about in ’59 or something like that.
Mr. Kolb: That was after the war then?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s go back to the wartime, here. So you were doing office management work?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Sort of. I say ‘administrative work’; they call them research assistants now.
Mr. Kolb: And you rose up high in the ranks, and so I’m sure you worked with dozens, hundreds of people.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, we had twenty-something-thousand when I worked for Hibbs.
Mr. Kolb: This at K-25?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that was at Carbide. I meant in the war days.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: In the war years, I don’t know. I think K-25 had, what, fifteen? [inaudible] to Y-12 was Larson in ’64, and worked at Y-12 from ’64 to my retirement in ’84.
Mr. Kolb: [Are there any] experiences in the workplace that you recall with some of these early experiences that come to mind off-hand?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well –
Mr. Kolb: It must have been a very turbulent time.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well it was, and so busy, busy. You know, we worked six days a week and wanted to because we really felt we would do anything to win the war, you know. And I feel I was quite lucky to become associated with so many people I never would have met in this society, and then they had such tremendous impact on everything.
Mr. Kolb: When you got to Oak Ridge you had to find – they found you a place to live I presume?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well yeah, I lived in a dormitory in West Village, we called it then, for a while until – that was by the old cafeteria here in the west end of town, the old cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: Was it near Bruner’s?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, no, up further toward Jefferson, that big building there. It was right around that. It was a dormitory and then a space opened in Bayon Hall where we had a semi-private bath, and I moved up to that in Townsite.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have a semi-private bath in the first one?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, no. My No, they were just terrible, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I see.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You had to stand in line to get to the lavatory, and in Bayon Hall we shared a bathroom with the occupant on the other side and that was [unclear: Richer] and that was positioned about where we call our skyscrapers located now.
Mr. Kolb: Jackson Plaza. That was a women’s dormitory?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and then Ed lived in Boone Hall. You remember that was back in there.
Mr. Kolb: How long did you live then in the dormitory, until you got married?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Until I got married.
Mr. Kolb: When was that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And we were married in June of ’47 and after that – I’ll tell you, that was really a trying period, you know, just with no children or anything, it was very hard to get a place to live. We lived a month in the Guest House and I was carting all these –
Mr. Kolb: Really, a month in the Guest House?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: A month up there while I was carting all these gifts around, you know, and then this woman in town owed Ed some money and she invited him to have us come out there and live for a while and that would be the way she’d pay him back, so we went out there a month and I had to sleep with her daughter who was – now that went on for another month and then we couldn’t stand it any longer and we went back to the Guest House for another month. And then I went into my boss at that time, that was Dunlap, that first one, and I said – on the left at the bottom – and I said, “You just have to do something to help us get a place to live. We just can’t tolerate this any longer.” So he did, and he got us an “E2” apartment which was pretty good, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Where was that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That was on Vandalia Road, which was off of Vermont, and it unfortunately happened to be the one that had the coal bin on the back, you know, and those places were not very well – not very tight. And I used to have to keep everything in the refrigerator because there would be soot all over everything in kitchen, you know, and everywhere, and I had to wrap my linens in the linen closet because they would have just had black all around. So we lived there until 1950, and the Garden Apartments opened up, and it took me about a year to get all that soot out of all of our stuff. And that’s when we lived over you, Jim, and Ed kind of liked apartment living. He has never been crazy about yard work. However, my mother came to live with us later and we just didn’t have enough room, so we built a house, this house. Been here ever since.
Mr. Kolb: So you had an evolution of living with people.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well you can imagine what Oak Ridge was like and the things that you had to endure, but being young, you just didn’t get phased by it.
Mr. Kolb: Well everyone else had the same kind of problems, right, or similar?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: But I never heard of anyone staying that long in the Guest House.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah and we shared a bath with some guy over there. You know, you had to lock the door on his side and then he would forget to unlock ours on our side so you’d have to bang or get somebody to come in and open the door.
Mr. Kolb: Well being this is in ’47, I guess you might have rubbed shoulders with some pretty important people in the Guest House too.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yes. I got to meet [unclear: Ken]. You know it’s been so long ago now, Eugene Wigner, people like that, of that stature, you know, but I was just a little girl, you know, and I didn’t have a lot of experience or talking with them too much, you know, and even after I got – later when I was in the president’s office, we had many, many visitors come through that I did get to meet and get their autographs and all that.
Mr. Kolb: You can understand why we’re trying to save the Guest House.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, Yes. And we were married in the Chapel on the Hill.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, my background was First Christian; Ed’s was Lutheran, and of course the Lutheran Church had not even been born then I don’t believe. But anyway, we were married by a Methodist minister in the Chapel on the Hill. As a matter of fact, when they had a celebration in here, in Oak Ridge, I can’t remember whether it was the 50th or not, we did restate our vows at the Chapel on the Hill and I had a picture.
Mr. Kolb: Of course a lot of people do the same thing, I mean Chapel on the Hill is kind of a common denominator.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yeah, and they had weddings, one right after the other, and we shared the cost of flowers and stuff like that.
Mr. Kolb: Really, for your wedding?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah because they had them one right after another. It was silly to redecorate the church and everything.
Mr. Kolb: So, during the war years, Mary Grace, you had the dormitory experience, and how did you get around? You didn’t have a car; did you just use the bus system?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, we just used the buses, yeah, and I would have to get one of those, you know, to go down and get groceries even and use the bus for that.
Mr. Kolb: Was there a grocery store in –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: It was called, what we called Center City then. It was about where the mall is now and –
Mr. Kolb: Midtown.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Midtown, yeah, and I shopped at Bruner’s there, they had the best meat in town, you know, and I can’t remember when the grocery store – it wasn’t Kroger. Kroger came in pretty early, but I can’t remember what other store was there, but then we of course got Bruner moved down west, that was later, and I shopped there. But I remember getting out of the bus one day and it was just icy outside and I had just gotten my groceries and I spilled all of them right outside the bus, but somebody came over and helped me get more bags and put them in there and then I tried to get Ed to let me order them from the grocery store. There was one that delivered. They were on – at Hilltop. They would deliver groceries, but you never knew what you were going to get that way. But we didn’t get a car until – well we had a thing about till we could lay down the cash for the whole thing and so we did.
Mr. Kolb: But that was after the war when you got a car?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t meet Ed until the night that the Germans surrendered, after the Germans surrendered. The night, that day, I met Ed and I remember there were about ten of us that stayed out all night long that night.
Mr. Kolb: Celebrating?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, well, you know, sort of, but we didn’t celebrate like they do now. We were just playing records and just laughing and everything.
Mr. Kolb: He was in the group?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and I remember we both particularly liked poetry and we were quoting poetry to each other all night. But I went to work the next day and my boss gave me some dictation and I fell asleep, and he thought that was so funny, you know. He thought it was funny and did not criticize me at all.
Mr. Kolb: Because you told him you were up all night?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I told him. Well, as a matter of fact, he’s the one who told me what they were doing here, you know. He said, “We’re going to be hitting the papers in a couple of days. I can’t tell you how and why.” That was Ibe Deck, and he said, “Just watch the papers.” Now Ed knew. Of course, they told the engineers what was going on here, but they didn’t tell people like me.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ��
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Wonder?
Mr. Kolb: Of course, you wondered, but I mean did you hear anybody else speculate or guess?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: The only thing that we were ever told was it was something for the war effort, something to help fight the war and knew that there were a lot of safety precautions around and stuff like that. You know, we were inhibited by rules and regulations, where you moved and all that stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Well you said Ed knew. Did he tell you, when you met him?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, no. He would never – in fact, none of the men told their wives. None of us knew. If they’d have told their wives, it��d have been all over the place, at bridge clubs and everything.
Mr. Kolb: He kept it secret; that’s good. Well speaking of the secretness of the town, were you aware of – let’s put it this way: I’m sure you were aware of the “spies” that were placed in the workplace, checking up on people. Were you aware of that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well security was quite strict then. I guess I never felt pressured by them in any way. I don’t remember that aspect of it too much. Nobody ever questioned me about anything. I knew that we had a strong security department and, what was his name, I can’t remember now –
Mr. Kolb: Security people.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And you had the security towers and guards and you had to go through, and my mother almost never got into the place, you know. But we felt somehow very safe here because it was an enclosed city and we never locked our doors, never even thought about it at that time and everybody was just so commingled, we just – you know, the people in Oak Ridge are a different breed from most cities in the early days. They were.
Mr. Kolb: Was there anyone that got fired because of security breach at work?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I’m trying to think. There were FBI agents, and I knew who they were and where they were.
Mr. Kolb: Of course after the war and the secret was out, you could disclose more, what so-and-so was doing and “Oh, you were one of those type.”
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yes, we had so much top secret information I was responsible for.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you – personally, you were?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn. And you certainly had to account for all of those.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, and there were certain [inaudible].
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yes, yes. If one was ever lost, that was terrible, you know, you had to really find it. There was no other recourse; you find it.
Mr. Kolb: No excuse. Okay, well, that’s interesting. The security assets were unique. [inaudible] going a little further in time, when in ’49 the town was opened up, a lot of people didn’t want to have it opened up for a while, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: They had a referendum taken, as I recall.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, we kind of liked our security here, yeah. I remember, you asked me if I ever knew of anybody. I did. I was aware that certain things happened but I didn’t know why, like their finding a dead body down on the tennis court or something like that, and it was just kind of hushed up. It was never, something, you know, and I’m sure it was a personal feud between someone, but you just never heard about it.
Mr. Kolb: Just take it away and taken care. Did that happen?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yeah, that happened and there were other things like that, but you have to remember that we had quite an assortment of people here, and as we had ninety thousand people during that time and –
Mr. Kolb: Construction and –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And construction, of every ilk you could find in the country, and so it’s amazing that more of that stuff didn’t happen. It just didn’t. We had a different kind of people then, you remember.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess, too, if somebody did slip up and was [inaudible] –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, yeah. Quietly, quietly, quietly. Eased away. Fortunately none of my friends ever learned that I knew about it.
Mr. Kolb: But people put up with a lot of that kind of attitude, yeah.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well they did and we found our own avenues to get together, you know. There were more clubs formed and interaction among the people in the arts and in the – I belong to the oldest dance group in the town.
Mr. Kolb: Where do they meet?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: They meet at the Country Club.
Mr. Kolb: I mean where did they meet?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, at that time they met at the Ridge Recreation Hall and other places. I don’t know. But it’s just amazing that it continued all those years. Ken Cowser’s in it and has always been very active in it. In fact he’s been in it longer than I have. It was started back – in fact we still had the Army here and they had to authorize the formation of the club. And I did a history on the club, and that was one of the things we had, that letter that started that club.
Mr. Kolb: You had to go through the Army to get permission?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was Bill Pollock involved in writing the music to that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yes, he did, and then we got enough money to have orchestras.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And we still do, but we just meet four times a year. But we are all getting old now and the young people don’t like ballroom dancing like we did, so it will cease to exist probably in my lifetime.
Mr. Kolb: Well, besides – okay, so getting to the discussion of activities, you had your – you said you and Ed were into poetry. Did you have a poetry group?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, no, we never did. We, of course, have pursued that interest all our lives. I have and so has he.
Mr. Kolb: But you did the ballroom dancing with the Dance Club.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, bridge clubs galore and book reviews and stuff like that, and you get a lot in your church too.
Mr. Kolb: And a lot of other musical activities, too.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, especially with Lutherans, you know. Music is one of their long suits.
Mr. Kolb: And through all these activities, you met all these different –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And the Art Center, we were always quite involved in that.
Mr. Kolb: When did that start? Was that during the war?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, no, it was after – Reading for the Blind, and that was started by Weinberg’s wife, I believe. But the Art Center later on, and we’ve always – the plants tried to support all these activities too. I used to have to go and rent about forty paintings every month or two to put throughout our offices at Y-12 after Dr. Larson took over.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Through all these activities, during the wartime, particularly, you met so many different types of people from all over, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yes, and fortunately I love people, you know, and those friendships I made then I still have, and Bill Wilcox is one of them. When I retired, I got a letter from [inaudible] from all these men that I had interacted with through [inaudible] and I have also been involved in the retirees group, so I have kept contact with all these old people. We’re all old. I’m seventy-nine years old and Bill is probably about that. Ed’s eighty-two.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever meet anybody you didn’t like?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: To the other extreme?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I have met a few bad apples, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t want any names.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You just kind of sidestep those and eventually they are weeded out. You know, there are many ways that you weed somebody out.
Mr. Kolb: [inaudible] was during the war because, as you say, a warm body was –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, you almost had to, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Unless they really screwed up, they found a place to put them.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: In one of my jobs, I had to keep a record of the people who might have [talked], you know.
Mr. Kolb: Really? This for security purposes?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You could watch the progress of that and you could tell: oh, this is chronic. You know, it’s chronic [inaudible] of course.
Mr. Kolb: Was one of your responsibilities –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well that just happened to be when I was in employee relations. We had to – and, of course, the medical department reported to my boss and we had [inaudible] just a little sideline.
Mr. Kolb: That’s interesting. I never heard that. That’s the first I heard anyone talk about that.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, you never, in a critical operation like you have now, you’ve got to have somebody watch [inaudible]. I mean, through no fault of theirs, knowledge of theirs or actual intent, they can cause you some problems.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Mary Grace, moving right along here, besides the cruddy buses you got to ride on in World War II days – and tell us about how you liked the mud. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, we became used to it. Of course, you remember at the time in the war years, we had a few sidewalks but there were all boardwalks. And they were not boardwalks; I remember coming out of my “E2” apartment, there was no boardwalk to the Turnpike and therefore I had to walk through mud to get to the bus to go to work. Well, I don’t know, looking back on it, it’s not a terrible memory. I coped with it. One funny thing about people I wanted to mention to you, we lived in that “E2” and there was a common porch on the front of the house, and Ed and I would get out there and we would scrub the front porch, you know, because mud and everything, but we had this odd guy living next door to us, and when he would come out, he scrubbed half the porch. He scrubbed his half and left ours and we scrubbed the whole thing when we got out there. Isn’t that funny?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, at least the porch was fortunate you were around.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: We always thought that was so funny. But I remember that mud, tracking it on the porch and going out to the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: Right, and you didn’t wear your good shoes out; you had to wear your galoshes or boots or whatever.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: We had galoshes and stuff like that, yeah, and then of course later on we got carpools. But there were no cars around.
Mr. Kolb: No, not for a while. Okay another interesting situation I guess in Oak Ridge was in a dry, alcoholic free, dry county and a lot of people still liked to drink of course. So how did you get along with that situation? Maybe you don’t drink, I don’t know.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, I do. My husband belonged to the Elks Club which was one of the early groups here.
Mr. Kolb: This was during the War too?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, yeah, and Ed said he joined it cause he could get a beer there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh really? Well that’s a good reason.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And then of course you remember we had lines everywhere for clinics and for everything so if you saw a line you just got in it, you know, to see if it might be something you wanted.
Mr. Kolb: There were no lines for alcohol though.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Or was there?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, for beer, and you could come through the line and then you could go back through the line, you know, if you wanted to. But of course, I remember Oakdale, there was some women who had a –
Mr. Kolb: There was a wet part of the country.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: She had something down there and, I don’t know, we might have gotten something from there at one time or another, whatever we wanted, which wasn’t much. People just didn’t imbibe that much in alcohol then.
Mr. Kolb: But it was present.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, you could get it. I remember when they had a referendum here to open a liquor store. Now, that would have been after the war.
Mr. Kolb: That was way after the War, oh yeah, way after the War.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Clouhar had, I remember, had –
Mr. Kolb: There were bootleggers back then too.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah there were bootleggers, we never participated in any of the "mountain dew" but even today, you know, Ed has a beer when he wants to, and I have a wine or something. But they’ve found now, you know, that – you’re not recording this are you?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah. So the lack of being in a dry area didn’t really stop people from drinking, “wet” as we call it, they found ways to get around it.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You remember they had dances in the Ridge Recreation Hall for a long time and everybody seemed to be able to get a bottle for that.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? People made out all right. Now you did participate in a lot of the local activities and you’ve met all these different kinds of people and you made a lot of friendships that you say lasted your whole life. How about the relations with the non-Oak Ridgers, like Knoxville and Clinton people that were not working here? Did you have dealings much with them during the war?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, of course, the stores. I did a lot of shopping in Knoxville. I was told early in my experience out here that the Knoxvillians still hadn’t accepted Norris, you know, and it would probably be some time before they accepted Oak Ridge. They were happy to have their people come out here and cart the money back to Knoxville, you know. I think that persists even to this day.
Mr. Kolb: So you felt there was a kind of attitude.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I think they kind of looked down on Oak Ridge. I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Was it jealousy?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I don’t know what it was. You know, we laughed about it, because who cares what they think?
Mr. Kolb: Right, okay, but you didn’t feel there was an attitude there.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Now, Ed and I belonged to the Deane Hill Country Club for a number of years and we got to meet a lot of Knoxvillians that way, so going in the stores, they were always nice to me. I can’t criticize them. I really felt there was kind of a barrier there between what they considered their society and [Oak Ridge], but Oak Ridgers just didn’t really care, you know. We had some of the most elite people in the country here.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right, had our own societies.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Had our own society.
Mr. Kolb: But you think it persisted.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I think it persists to this day, but not as blatantly.
Mr. Kolb: They do like our money and the fact that so many people work here live in Knox County and Knoxville.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And that is really sad that they didn’t sell this property out here before some of them moved away like that. I thought about it, going to West Hills in Knoxville, but we decided we’d rather stay in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: You found that life in Oak Ridge was worthwhile, [worth] sticking with, in other words.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yes, yes, I just love the people. We have such an amalgamation of people in the country. I’m from the south, of course, and I got kidded a lot about my southern accent.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t have a strong accent.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, it’s never changed, you know. You can have two families live side by side in my hometown, one of them will have a [inaudible] Nashvillian talk, you know, and the next one just talks and it’s more like a Midwestern talk.
Mr. Kolb: And Ed is from Michigan?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Michigan. We had no problem communicating.
Mr. Kolb: But you had this mixing of north and south.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and oh my, my husband lost his father early, too, and his mother has spent a lot of time back and forth, and she just loves my people in Mississippi, and they loved her too. I came from that culture, you know, plantation culture, that you remember doesn’t exist much anymore.
Mr. Kolb: Now they’re historical places and tourist places more than anything else, yeah. Well you really had an interesting career. Besides all your busyness in community activities back during the war did you participate in any of the special war activities like collecting aluminum foil and buying war bonds and –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, oh gosh, yeah, we bought war bonds and I participated, insofar as I could; whatever they wanted to collect, I would collect, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Remember the project at K-25 about the Sunday Punch Bomber? It was bought by K-25 workers, Sunday Punch Bomber, remember that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well, Mary Grace, how about the colored people, the Afro-Americans of that early day, did you have much or any contact with them? Either in the workplace or –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yes, of course they got into mostly the service group, you know, cleaning stuff and that kind of thing. I did have to have help in the house and had a lot of [inaudible] in that, you know, and even till a couple of years, now, I use a maid service. A couple of years ago, I had this same lady, and during the time that I had her, or maybe it was a little before then, she had five children. Her husband died when he was young and she gave all of those kids a college education. Athletic scholarships. One of them was a brass – what’s the third one? Third Olympic gold medalist?
Mr. Kolb: Bronze.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Bronze, gold medal, running, but she was just an unusual type. With an education, that women would have done – oh, she was so smart, just didn’t have the opportunity. We tried to – all the people she worked with tried to reward her for her loyalty and her really wonderful service. I grew up with millions of them – hundreds, I mean, hundreds of them – and we had a good relationship with them. I realize it wasn’t right, ideal, but we never mistreated them. We gave them everything they needed on the plantation. We didn’t have anybody living in our neighborhoods here. We had some good friends in that race.
Mr. Kolb: The bus system was segregated too, was all sort of automatic that they didn’t, just sit in the back?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, just went to the back until Rosa Parks did the, you know the – in Alabama.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that was later.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, much later. But I think that didn’t change until about that time, did it, right? They just sat in the back.
Mr. Kolb: ’57, ’58, somewhere around there, yeah.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I never went to school with any. I asked Ed if he did and he said, yeah, he had one person in his class.
Mr. Kolb: In the university?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: At the University of Michigan.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t know – I often wonder where they came from. Were they local people or were they brought in?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I don’t remember that aspect. I think they were fairly local. I don’t remember they were importing a lot of them in here. I don’t know where they came from, really. I do remember we had a Hawaiian girl who worked out there, and you know Hawaii had started to intermix the races a lot earlier than any of the rest of them. She used to get her feelings hurt, you know, when a maid would come in the room or something, you know, that we were tolerating that kind of thing, that she had to work – that we should do something about that.
Mr. Kolb: The segregation?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah. That just stunned me being from Mississippi, you know. Then when I got to Hawaii not too many years later, I saw what she meant. And how she ever got here, I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Well, when the magic day happened and the first A-bomb was dropped and the news was out, where were you and how did you hear about it? The secret was out.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I was at work. I don’t know, Jim, I just can’t remember the specific reference or when I heard about it. I was happy it happened and both my brothers were in the service and all of my relatives, cousins, everybody I knew. My boyfriend was in the service and I was just happy. I felt it was going to shorten the war and I was very pleased that we had been a part of that activity.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I understand there was a big party kind of atmosphere, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, yeah, but, you know, everybody running up and down the Turnpike and yelling. That’s what we did.
Mr. Kolb: And the News Sentinel and all the newspapers blasted it all around.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You know, it got to be kind of improper for you to even brag about – not brag, but even say anything about having helped win the war, and we’re supposed to feel guilty about having done that.
Mr. Kolb: You mean now or at that time?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, when I was working, later, and so I got out these newspapers – you mentioned the newspapers – I got them out and I’ve made copies of them and I plastered them on the wall. Mr. Hibbs agreed with me, you know, that we can’t forget what happened. And we are not sorry one bit having participated in it.
Mr. Kolb: No, yeah. There was quite a relaxation I guess for a few days when the news was out.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yeah. Well, that was the climax, of course, and we knew things were going to be different in the future.
Mr. Kolb: And it happened real kind of fast.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, too fast really.
Mr. Kolb: Y-12 went down.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and K-25 and, of course, X-10, we kept them but they changed their focus a bit.
Mr. Kolb: You were still at K-25 all through the war, is that right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I went to Y-12 about ’64, I believe.
Mr. Kolb: So K-25 –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: But I worked for the President out there, Larson, you know, and then he decided he wanted to be closer to the community because we were being nagged about contributing to the community and that kind of thing, and tried to do that. [inaudible] you know, the rest of my tenure. It was kind of routine.
Mr. Kolb: Larson made a fairly substantial contribution; he was a chemist for [inaudible].
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well he was at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory for a while I believe, or did some work with them. I don’t know. He came down here when Mr. Center had his nervous breakdown and he took over.
Mr. Kolb: That was at Union Carbide?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn. Then he left. I worked for him for about five years and he left and became a United States Commissioner, or D.C. Commissioner.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah, he had a very important career. He was with the calutrons.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Calutrons.
Mr. Kolb: With Lawrence Berkley Labs.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Did something with chemistry.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: So I think his son, Bob, still worked out in that area. He lost [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: So you went through the trauma of what’s going to happen to Oak Ridge right after the war, or course, not knowing what or how.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: If you wanted to stay here, you had to – we decided early on we wanted to stay here. [inaudible] else to add to it, it was a long, long experience. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Mr. Kolb: I guess not, including the gates opening in ’49 when things – that was a big change.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, it was. I remember when I came here, my mother sent my trunk and it ended up over here in a railroad station, they didn’t even know where Oak Ridge was, you know, it was just kept [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: In Knoxville somewhere you mean?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well it finally got over here and somebody called me and said it was over there. I had it bused over here or whatever. Oh, and those early dormitories too, you had no way of hanging your clothes or anything, you just spread them out on a chair until you could get hangers. Oh, and I remember I thought, here I was – see, I had graduated from college when I was twenty. That was pretty young, and I came up here and I thought, I have to be careful about my associations, you know. I pretty much stayed by myself or I interacted with the girls that had come from my school. But I remember this one girl approaching me and saying [inaudible] at the skating rink after dinner and stay a long time and I thought, I believe I won’t do that. So I don’t know, they might have thought I was snobbish, but I don’t think so. You just have to be careful.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you say you went to dinner. Was that a cafeteria?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Cafeteria, in fact it was that same one that I was telling you about at Jefferson, you know. But you had to walk all the way where those little houses are now on the left going up the Turnpike, my first dormitory was there and then I moved to West Village and then to Bayon Hall. It’s right where that bank that’s unoccupied is located now. I didn’t ever get involved with the skating rink. But I felt maybe I was too young to get involved in something like that. But we had, you remember, tennis court dances in the beginning.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, Bill Pollock pipes in music, yeah.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And I remember six –
[Side B]
Mrs. Kirstowsky: – not really significant, but about six of us would go over together and we all came home together, too. But I remember one night this Polish boy asked me to dance and he wanted to do the polka, and I danced with him a lot, that polka, all night and I remember I could hardly get out of bed the next morning. I didn’t even know how to do the polka too much; that was not in my background. But doing that on a concrete slab was not fun.
Mr. Kolb: But you did it.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, sure, when you’re young you’ll do anything like that.
Mr. Kolb: You said the tennis court, was that the –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That was at Jefferson.
Mr. Kolb: Jefferson Tennis Court, right.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: There was four there or something like that, but that’s where –and sort of a harmless activity, too, if you were in mass.
Mr. Kolb: How often were those tennis court dances held? Just on the weekends?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: As I remember it, Friday and Saturday night or something like that. I don’t remember participating in any. I think it was Saturday night if we ever went down there.
Mr. Kolb: During the summertime, when it was warmer.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Other times the dances were in the rec halls, inside in the wintertime.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: How about the movie theater? Ever go to the movie theaters?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yes. Let me see. When Grove was, do you remember when it was opened? The Grove Theatre was an early one. I can’t remember how soon it opened, but we went there. We’d go into Knoxville in a group.
Mr. Kolb: The Tennessee Theatre?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: [inaudible] we loved, yeah. Didn’t have television then, you know.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. Didn’t need it. Didn’t know what you were missing.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there was plenty to do if you just kept your nose clean and didn’t get into trouble.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, and most of the time you worked so hard, you know, during daytime, you didn’t really want to do anything at night except get ready for the next day.
Mr. Kolb: Exhausting, mentally exhausting, not just physically.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, that’s right. Our activity was pretty much confined to the weekend. Of course, we rode to work in those big old cattle cars, you know, where you sat around.
Mr. Kolb: The one’s they brought down from Chicago?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I don’t know where they got them, but you stood up most of the time. I still remember trying to read the paper standing up.
Mr. Kolb: Bouncing along.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And not really thinking anything about it, you know, that there could be a better way of doing it.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been told that the bus system in Oak Ridge at that time was the 6th or 7th largest in the United States.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I’m not surprised. There was one here at West Village and then the Central Bus Terminal. We couldn’t have made it without those buses. Of course, that wasn’t involved in our contract; that was another.
Mr. Kolb: We’ve about exhausted the things I wanted to talk about Mary Grace.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I’m afraid I haven’t covered them adequately and perhaps injected some things that you’re not interested in at all.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s summarize by, I guess you said, and you believe, that Oak Ridge is a unique community. What makes it unusual or unique in your mind?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well I think that, in general, the people here are extremely intelligent. I think more than you would find in a normal community. Also patriotic, and the desire to build the wonderful town; they formed all these activities that were official and entertaining like the Playhouse. I think we were quite active in the Playhouse and always have been. And we early on picked out the areas that we wanted to concentrate on and made contributions to them through the years. I think people here are a little more innovative than my hometown.
Mr. Kolb: How big was your hometown?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: About fifteen thousand.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so it was not small.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah. I remember our pastor at the Lutheran church said he was so frightened to come here because of all the intelligent people; he finished at the top of his seminary, at the top of his class, but he said that in board meetings at the church, somebody would make a statement and all these guys would pull out their slide rule and say, “Let’s see, now if we do this.” He said he was intimidated by that crew, and most of them were Ph.D.s. Many of them were. He learned to love them because they were so different.
Mr. Kolb: What was his name?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Crumley. He went on to be the Bishop of the Lutheran Church of America. In fact we have two former pastors that became bishops. Fenaway became the Bishop of Florida not too long ago. We feel quite fortunate in having such outstanding men work with us here.
Mr. Kolb: There is a lot of legacy that we try to keep up, I guess you might say, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, yeah.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well thank you, Mary Grace, you’ve been very generous with your thoughts and we appreciate your information.
[end of recording]

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

ORAL HISTORY OF MARY GRACE KIRSTOWSKY
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
February 27, 2003
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Mary Grace, let���s start by beginning to have you tell us how and why you came to Oak Ridge, I presume, from Mississippi, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I did. I was living in Clarksdale, Mississippi but attending Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi. Carbide sent a Mr. Kolb down to interview the seniors that year and they talked a little bit about the project and I decided to come here along with about three other ladies from that school too.
Mr. Kolb: Who were they?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: [inaudible] Keysler and Martha Coates and Jo Mason. I expected to be a school teacher. However, both my brothers were in the service, and although I had lost my father when I was very young, mother insisted on my learning to make a living. I thought since I was only twenty years old, it would be nice to come up here during the war and do what I could, if anything, and then get back into teaching. I never did that because I enjoyed it up here, and maybe it would have been [inaudible] a teacher but I doubt it.
Mr. Kolb: What happened when you got to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: When I got to Oak Ridge, I lived in a dormitory.
Mr. Kolb: I mean before; tell us the experience of coming to Oak Ridge. Where did you go, to Knoxville?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I went to Knoxville. I stayed there in a hotel and was interviewed. They had an office in Knoxville that sort of screened out the applicants, and then I came out, came out here, I don’t know, on some sort of [inaudible] they had and went to K-25 and was picked up right away. They were hiring a lot of people then, almost anybody with a warm body.
Mr. Kolb: And what was your first job?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: My first job, I was approached down in the employment office by a lady, Sally Samahoff from New York. She worked with Carl Babcock who was, I think, in charge of keeping equipment, registering equipment and all that stuff, and I stayed with him for just a very little while. There was another fellow that came in who was an architect from Arkansas and he was kind of a colorful character. He wore spats and a bowler hat and carried a cane.
Mr. Kolb: During work?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, well yeah, that��s the way he was dressed all the time. I worked for him for a little while and then they transferred me to an assistant division head who was Ibe Deck. He was a [inaudible] quite a colorful character and a great mind. But you remember that this was staffed by some of the best people all over the country. He was one of them, and I think he really knew an awful lot about barrier, for instance. Then he was succeeded by Bill Humes who was a Harvard Engineer. You remember him. He was succeeded very well and went on to the New York office, and because there was a little bit of jealously between Ibe Deck and Humes, my former boss decided to send me over to a division head to work because he didn’t particularly like Humes. I would [have] loved to have stayed with him. I worked for him for a little while and he was a wonderful boss. Then I worked for a division head, Art Dunlap, who was in safety and protection, and he was succeeded by Baylor, and I worked for him quite a long time and he became Assistant Plant Manager out there. I continued to work for him and then I worked for the Plant Manager, Paul Huber, and when Emlette’s secretary, who was over the three plants, left, they moved me into that slot and I worked for him until he left here. He was succeeded by Johnny Murray.
Mr. Kolb: Excuse me. Huber, what time period was that, approximately?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That was about in ’59 or something like that.
Mr. Kolb: That was after the war then?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s go back to the wartime, here. So you were doing office management work?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Sort of. I say ‘administrative work’; they call them research assistants now.
Mr. Kolb: And you rose up high in the ranks, and so I’m sure you worked with dozens, hundreds of people.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, we had twenty-something-thousand when I worked for Hibbs.
Mr. Kolb: This at K-25?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that was at Carbide. I meant in the war days.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: In the war years, I don’t know. I think K-25 had, what, fifteen? [inaudible] to Y-12 was Larson in ’64, and worked at Y-12 from ’64 to my retirement in ’84.
Mr. Kolb: [Are there any] experiences in the workplace that you recall with some of these early experiences that come to mind off-hand?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well –
Mr. Kolb: It must have been a very turbulent time.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well it was, and so busy, busy. You know, we worked six days a week and wanted to because we really felt we would do anything to win the war, you know. And I feel I was quite lucky to become associated with so many people I never would have met in this society, and then they had such tremendous impact on everything.
Mr. Kolb: When you got to Oak Ridge you had to find – they found you a place to live I presume?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well yeah, I lived in a dormitory in West Village, we called it then, for a while until – that was by the old cafeteria here in the west end of town, the old cafeteria.
Mr. Kolb: Was it near Bruner’s?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, no, up further toward Jefferson, that big building there. It was right around that. It was a dormitory and then a space opened in Bayon Hall where we had a semi-private bath, and I moved up to that in Townsite.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have a semi-private bath in the first one?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, no. My No, they were just terrible, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I see.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You had to stand in line to get to the lavatory, and in Bayon Hall we shared a bathroom with the occupant on the other side and that was [unclear: Richer] and that was positioned about where we call our skyscrapers located now.
Mr. Kolb: Jackson Plaza. That was a women’s dormitory?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and then Ed lived in Boone Hall. You remember that was back in there.
Mr. Kolb: How long did you live then in the dormitory, until you got married?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Until I got married.
Mr. Kolb: When was that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And we were married in June of ’47 and after that – I’ll tell you, that was really a trying period, you know, just with no children or anything, it was very hard to get a place to live. We lived a month in the Guest House and I was carting all these –
Mr. Kolb: Really, a month in the Guest House?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: A month up there while I was carting all these gifts around, you know, and then this woman in town owed Ed some money and she invited him to have us come out there and live for a while and that would be the way she’d pay him back, so we went out there a month and I had to sleep with her daughter who was – now that went on for another month and then we couldn’t stand it any longer and we went back to the Guest House for another month. And then I went into my boss at that time, that was Dunlap, that first one, and I said – on the left at the bottom – and I said, “You just have to do something to help us get a place to live. We just can’t tolerate this any longer.” So he did, and he got us an “E2” apartment which was pretty good, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Where was that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That was on Vandalia Road, which was off of Vermont, and it unfortunately happened to be the one that had the coal bin on the back, you know, and those places were not very well – not very tight. And I used to have to keep everything in the refrigerator because there would be soot all over everything in kitchen, you know, and everywhere, and I had to wrap my linens in the linen closet because they would have just had black all around. So we lived there until 1950, and the Garden Apartments opened up, and it took me about a year to get all that soot out of all of our stuff. And that’s when we lived over you, Jim, and Ed kind of liked apartment living. He has never been crazy about yard work. However, my mother came to live with us later and we just didn’t have enough room, so we built a house, this house. Been here ever since.
Mr. Kolb: So you had an evolution of living with people.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well you can imagine what Oak Ridge was like and the things that you had to endure, but being young, you just didn’t get phased by it.
Mr. Kolb: Well everyone else had the same kind of problems, right, or similar?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: But I never heard of anyone staying that long in the Guest House.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah and we shared a bath with some guy over there. You know, you had to lock the door on his side and then he would forget to unlock ours on our side so you’d have to bang or get somebody to come in and open the door.
Mr. Kolb: Well being this is in ’47, I guess you might have rubbed shoulders with some pretty important people in the Guest House too.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yes. I got to meet [unclear: Ken]. You know it’s been so long ago now, Eugene Wigner, people like that, of that stature, you know, but I was just a little girl, you know, and I didn’t have a lot of experience or talking with them too much, you know, and even after I got – later when I was in the president’s office, we had many, many visitors come through that I did get to meet and get their autographs and all that.
Mr. Kolb: You can understand why we’re trying to save the Guest House.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, Yes. And we were married in the Chapel on the Hill.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, my background was First Christian; Ed’s was Lutheran, and of course the Lutheran Church had not even been born then I don’t believe. But anyway, we were married by a Methodist minister in the Chapel on the Hill. As a matter of fact, when they had a celebration in here, in Oak Ridge, I can’t remember whether it was the 50th or not, we did restate our vows at the Chapel on the Hill and I had a picture.
Mr. Kolb: Of course a lot of people do the same thing, I mean Chapel on the Hill is kind of a common denominator.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yeah, and they had weddings, one right after the other, and we shared the cost of flowers and stuff like that.
Mr. Kolb: Really, for your wedding?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah because they had them one right after another. It was silly to redecorate the church and everything.
Mr. Kolb: So, during the war years, Mary Grace, you had the dormitory experience, and how did you get around? You didn’t have a car; did you just use the bus system?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, we just used the buses, yeah, and I would have to get one of those, you know, to go down and get groceries even and use the bus for that.
Mr. Kolb: Was there a grocery store in –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: It was called, what we called Center City then. It was about where the mall is now and –
Mr. Kolb: Midtown.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Midtown, yeah, and I shopped at Bruner’s there, they had the best meat in town, you know, and I can’t remember when the grocery store – it wasn’t Kroger. Kroger came in pretty early, but I can’t remember what other store was there, but then we of course got Bruner moved down west, that was later, and I shopped there. But I remember getting out of the bus one day and it was just icy outside and I had just gotten my groceries and I spilled all of them right outside the bus, but somebody came over and helped me get more bags and put them in there and then I tried to get Ed to let me order them from the grocery store. There was one that delivered. They were on – at Hilltop. They would deliver groceries, but you never knew what you were going to get that way. But we didn’t get a car until – well we had a thing about till we could lay down the cash for the whole thing and so we did.
Mr. Kolb: But that was after the war when you got a car?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t meet Ed until the night that the Germans surrendered, after the Germans surrendered. The night, that day, I met Ed and I remember there were about ten of us that stayed out all night long that night.
Mr. Kolb: Celebrating?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, well, you know, sort of, but we didn’t celebrate like they do now. We were just playing records and just laughing and everything.
Mr. Kolb: He was in the group?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and I remember we both particularly liked poetry and we were quoting poetry to each other all night. But I went to work the next day and my boss gave me some dictation and I fell asleep, and he thought that was so funny, you know. He thought it was funny and did not criticize me at all.
Mr. Kolb: Because you told him you were up all night?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I told him. Well, as a matter of fact, he’s the one who told me what they were doing here, you know. He said, “We’re going to be hitting the papers in a couple of days. I can’t tell you how and why.” That was Ibe Deck, and he said, “Just watch the papers.” Now Ed knew. Of course, they told the engineers what was going on here, but they didn’t tell people like me.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ��
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Wonder?
Mr. Kolb: Of course, you wondered, but I mean did you hear anybody else speculate or guess?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: The only thing that we were ever told was it was something for the war effort, something to help fight the war and knew that there were a lot of safety precautions around and stuff like that. You know, we were inhibited by rules and regulations, where you moved and all that stuff.
Mr. Kolb: Well you said Ed knew. Did he tell you, when you met him?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, no. He would never – in fact, none of the men told their wives. None of us knew. If they’d have told their wives, it��d have been all over the place, at bridge clubs and everything.
Mr. Kolb: He kept it secret; that’s good. Well speaking of the secretness of the town, were you aware of – let’s put it this way: I’m sure you were aware of the “spies” that were placed in the workplace, checking up on people. Were you aware of that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well security was quite strict then. I guess I never felt pressured by them in any way. I don’t remember that aspect of it too much. Nobody ever questioned me about anything. I knew that we had a strong security department and, what was his name, I can’t remember now –
Mr. Kolb: Security people.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And you had the security towers and guards and you had to go through, and my mother almost never got into the place, you know. But we felt somehow very safe here because it was an enclosed city and we never locked our doors, never even thought about it at that time and everybody was just so commingled, we just – you know, the people in Oak Ridge are a different breed from most cities in the early days. They were.
Mr. Kolb: Was there anyone that got fired because of security breach at work?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I’m trying to think. There were FBI agents, and I knew who they were and where they were.
Mr. Kolb: Of course after the war and the secret was out, you could disclose more, what so-and-so was doing and “Oh, you were one of those type.”
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yes, we had so much top secret information I was responsible for.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you – personally, you were?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn. And you certainly had to account for all of those.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, and there were certain [inaudible].
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yes, yes. If one was ever lost, that was terrible, you know, you had to really find it. There was no other recourse; you find it.
Mr. Kolb: No excuse. Okay, well, that’s interesting. The security assets were unique. [inaudible] going a little further in time, when in ’49 the town was opened up, a lot of people didn’t want to have it opened up for a while, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: They had a referendum taken, as I recall.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, we kind of liked our security here, yeah. I remember, you asked me if I ever knew of anybody. I did. I was aware that certain things happened but I didn’t know why, like their finding a dead body down on the tennis court or something like that, and it was just kind of hushed up. It was never, something, you know, and I’m sure it was a personal feud between someone, but you just never heard about it.
Mr. Kolb: Just take it away and taken care. Did that happen?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yeah, that happened and there were other things like that, but you have to remember that we had quite an assortment of people here, and as we had ninety thousand people during that time and –
Mr. Kolb: Construction and –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And construction, of every ilk you could find in the country, and so it’s amazing that more of that stuff didn’t happen. It just didn’t. We had a different kind of people then, you remember.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess, too, if somebody did slip up and was [inaudible] –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, yeah. Quietly, quietly, quietly. Eased away. Fortunately none of my friends ever learned that I knew about it.
Mr. Kolb: But people put up with a lot of that kind of attitude, yeah.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well they did and we found our own avenues to get together, you know. There were more clubs formed and interaction among the people in the arts and in the – I belong to the oldest dance group in the town.
Mr. Kolb: Where do they meet?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: They meet at the Country Club.
Mr. Kolb: I mean where did they meet?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, at that time they met at the Ridge Recreation Hall and other places. I don’t know. But it’s just amazing that it continued all those years. Ken Cowser’s in it and has always been very active in it. In fact he’s been in it longer than I have. It was started back – in fact we still had the Army here and they had to authorize the formation of the club. And I did a history on the club, and that was one of the things we had, that letter that started that club.
Mr. Kolb: You had to go through the Army to get permission?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was Bill Pollock involved in writing the music to that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yes, he did, and then we got enough money to have orchestras.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And we still do, but we just meet four times a year. But we are all getting old now and the young people don’t like ballroom dancing like we did, so it will cease to exist probably in my lifetime.
Mr. Kolb: Well, besides – okay, so getting to the discussion of activities, you had your – you said you and Ed were into poetry. Did you have a poetry group?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, no, we never did. We, of course, have pursued that interest all our lives. I have and so has he.
Mr. Kolb: But you did the ballroom dancing with the Dance Club.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, bridge clubs galore and book reviews and stuff like that, and you get a lot in your church too.
Mr. Kolb: And a lot of other musical activities, too.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, especially with Lutherans, you know. Music is one of their long suits.
Mr. Kolb: And through all these activities, you met all these different –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And the Art Center, we were always quite involved in that.
Mr. Kolb: When did that start? Was that during the war?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, no, it was after – Reading for the Blind, and that was started by Weinberg’s wife, I believe. But the Art Center later on, and we’ve always – the plants tried to support all these activities too. I used to have to go and rent about forty paintings every month or two to put throughout our offices at Y-12 after Dr. Larson took over.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Through all these activities, during the wartime, particularly, you met so many different types of people from all over, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yes, and fortunately I love people, you know, and those friendships I made then I still have, and Bill Wilcox is one of them. When I retired, I got a letter from [inaudible] from all these men that I had interacted with through [inaudible] and I have also been involved in the retirees group, so I have kept contact with all these old people. We’re all old. I’m seventy-nine years old and Bill is probably about that. Ed’s eighty-two.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever meet anybody you didn’t like?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: To the other extreme?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I have met a few bad apples, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t want any names.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You just kind of sidestep those and eventually they are weeded out. You know, there are many ways that you weed somebody out.
Mr. Kolb: [inaudible] was during the war because, as you say, a warm body was –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, you almost had to, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Unless they really screwed up, they found a place to put them.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: In one of my jobs, I had to keep a record of the people who might have [talked], you know.
Mr. Kolb: Really? This for security purposes?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You could watch the progress of that and you could tell: oh, this is chronic. You know, it’s chronic [inaudible] of course.
Mr. Kolb: Was one of your responsibilities –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well that just happened to be when I was in employee relations. We had to – and, of course, the medical department reported to my boss and we had [inaudible] just a little sideline.
Mr. Kolb: That’s interesting. I never heard that. That’s the first I heard anyone talk about that.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, you never, in a critical operation like you have now, you’ve got to have somebody watch [inaudible]. I mean, through no fault of theirs, knowledge of theirs or actual intent, they can cause you some problems.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Mary Grace, moving right along here, besides the cruddy buses you got to ride on in World War II days – and tell us about how you liked the mud. You haven’t forgotten that, have you?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, we became used to it. Of course, you remember at the time in the war years, we had a few sidewalks but there were all boardwalks. And they were not boardwalks; I remember coming out of my “E2” apartment, there was no boardwalk to the Turnpike and therefore I had to walk through mud to get to the bus to go to work. Well, I don’t know, looking back on it, it’s not a terrible memory. I coped with it. One funny thing about people I wanted to mention to you, we lived in that “E2” and there was a common porch on the front of the house, and Ed and I would get out there and we would scrub the front porch, you know, because mud and everything, but we had this odd guy living next door to us, and when he would come out, he scrubbed half the porch. He scrubbed his half and left ours and we scrubbed the whole thing when we got out there. Isn’t that funny?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, at least the porch was fortunate you were around.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: We always thought that was so funny. But I remember that mud, tracking it on the porch and going out to the Turnpike.
Mr. Kolb: Right, and you didn’t wear your good shoes out; you had to wear your galoshes or boots or whatever.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: We had galoshes and stuff like that, yeah, and then of course later on we got carpools. But there were no cars around.
Mr. Kolb: No, not for a while. Okay another interesting situation I guess in Oak Ridge was in a dry, alcoholic free, dry county and a lot of people still liked to drink of course. So how did you get along with that situation? Maybe you don’t drink, I don’t know.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, I do. My husband belonged to the Elks Club which was one of the early groups here.
Mr. Kolb: This was during the War too?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, yeah, and Ed said he joined it cause he could get a beer there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh really? Well that’s a good reason.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And then of course you remember we had lines everywhere for clinics and for everything so if you saw a line you just got in it, you know, to see if it might be something you wanted.
Mr. Kolb: There were no lines for alcohol though.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Or was there?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, for beer, and you could come through the line and then you could go back through the line, you know, if you wanted to. But of course, I remember Oakdale, there was some women who had a –
Mr. Kolb: There was a wet part of the country.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: She had something down there and, I don’t know, we might have gotten something from there at one time or another, whatever we wanted, which wasn’t much. People just didn’t imbibe that much in alcohol then.
Mr. Kolb: But it was present.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, you could get it. I remember when they had a referendum here to open a liquor store. Now, that would have been after the war.
Mr. Kolb: That was way after the War, oh yeah, way after the War.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Clouhar had, I remember, had –
Mr. Kolb: There were bootleggers back then too.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah there were bootleggers, we never participated in any of the "mountain dew" but even today, you know, Ed has a beer when he wants to, and I have a wine or something. But they’ve found now, you know, that – you’re not recording this are you?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah. So the lack of being in a dry area didn’t really stop people from drinking, “wet” as we call it, they found ways to get around it.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You remember they had dances in the Ridge Recreation Hall for a long time and everybody seemed to be able to get a bottle for that.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? People made out all right. Now you did participate in a lot of the local activities and you’ve met all these different kinds of people and you made a lot of friendships that you say lasted your whole life. How about the relations with the non-Oak Ridgers, like Knoxville and Clinton people that were not working here? Did you have dealings much with them during the war?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, of course, the stores. I did a lot of shopping in Knoxville. I was told early in my experience out here that the Knoxvillians still hadn’t accepted Norris, you know, and it would probably be some time before they accepted Oak Ridge. They were happy to have their people come out here and cart the money back to Knoxville, you know. I think that persists even to this day.
Mr. Kolb: So you felt there was a kind of attitude.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I think they kind of looked down on Oak Ridge. I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Was it jealousy?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I don’t know what it was. You know, we laughed about it, because who cares what they think?
Mr. Kolb: Right, okay, but you didn’t feel there was an attitude there.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Now, Ed and I belonged to the Deane Hill Country Club for a number of years and we got to meet a lot of Knoxvillians that way, so going in the stores, they were always nice to me. I can’t criticize them. I really felt there was kind of a barrier there between what they considered their society and [Oak Ridge], but Oak Ridgers just didn’t really care, you know. We had some of the most elite people in the country here.
Mr. Kolb: Right, right, had our own societies.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Had our own society.
Mr. Kolb: But you think it persisted.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I think it persists to this day, but not as blatantly.
Mr. Kolb: They do like our money and the fact that so many people work here live in Knox County and Knoxville.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And that is really sad that they didn’t sell this property out here before some of them moved away like that. I thought about it, going to West Hills in Knoxville, but we decided we’d rather stay in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: You found that life in Oak Ridge was worthwhile, [worth] sticking with, in other words.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yes, yes, I just love the people. We have such an amalgamation of people in the country. I’m from the south, of course, and I got kidded a lot about my southern accent.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t have a strong accent.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, it’s never changed, you know. You can have two families live side by side in my hometown, one of them will have a [inaudible] Nashvillian talk, you know, and the next one just talks and it’s more like a Midwestern talk.
Mr. Kolb: And Ed is from Michigan?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Michigan. We had no problem communicating.
Mr. Kolb: But you had this mixing of north and south.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and oh my, my husband lost his father early, too, and his mother has spent a lot of time back and forth, and she just loves my people in Mississippi, and they loved her too. I came from that culture, you know, plantation culture, that you remember doesn’t exist much anymore.
Mr. Kolb: Now they’re historical places and tourist places more than anything else, yeah. Well you really had an interesting career. Besides all your busyness in community activities back during the war did you participate in any of the special war activities like collecting aluminum foil and buying war bonds and –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, oh gosh, yeah, we bought war bonds and I participated, insofar as I could; whatever they wanted to collect, I would collect, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Remember the project at K-25 about the Sunday Punch Bomber? It was bought by K-25 workers, Sunday Punch Bomber, remember that?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well, Mary Grace, how about the colored people, the Afro-Americans of that early day, did you have much or any contact with them? Either in the workplace or –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh yes, of course they got into mostly the service group, you know, cleaning stuff and that kind of thing. I did have to have help in the house and had a lot of [inaudible] in that, you know, and even till a couple of years, now, I use a maid service. A couple of years ago, I had this same lady, and during the time that I had her, or maybe it was a little before then, she had five children. Her husband died when he was young and she gave all of those kids a college education. Athletic scholarships. One of them was a brass – what’s the third one? Third Olympic gold medalist?
Mr. Kolb: Bronze.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Bronze, gold medal, running, but she was just an unusual type. With an education, that women would have done – oh, she was so smart, just didn’t have the opportunity. We tried to – all the people she worked with tried to reward her for her loyalty and her really wonderful service. I grew up with millions of them – hundreds, I mean, hundreds of them – and we had a good relationship with them. I realize it wasn’t right, ideal, but we never mistreated them. We gave them everything they needed on the plantation. We didn’t have anybody living in our neighborhoods here. We had some good friends in that race.
Mr. Kolb: The bus system was segregated too, was all sort of automatic that they didn’t, just sit in the back?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, just went to the back until Rosa Parks did the, you know the – in Alabama.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that was later.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, much later. But I think that didn’t change until about that time, did it, right? They just sat in the back.
Mr. Kolb: ’57, ’58, somewhere around there, yeah.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I never went to school with any. I asked Ed if he did and he said, yeah, he had one person in his class.
Mr. Kolb: In the university?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: At the University of Michigan.
Mr. Kolb: You don’t know – I often wonder where they came from. Were they local people or were they brought in?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I don’t remember that aspect. I think they were fairly local. I don’t remember they were importing a lot of them in here. I don’t know where they came from, really. I do remember we had a Hawaiian girl who worked out there, and you know Hawaii had started to intermix the races a lot earlier than any of the rest of them. She used to get her feelings hurt, you know, when a maid would come in the room or something, you know, that we were tolerating that kind of thing, that she had to work – that we should do something about that.
Mr. Kolb: The segregation?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah. That just stunned me being from Mississippi, you know. Then when I got to Hawaii not too many years later, I saw what she meant. And how she ever got here, I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Well, when the magic day happened and the first A-bomb was dropped and the news was out, where were you and how did you hear about it? The secret was out.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I was at work. I don’t know, Jim, I just can’t remember the specific reference or when I heard about it. I was happy it happened and both my brothers were in the service and all of my relatives, cousins, everybody I knew. My boyfriend was in the service and I was just happy. I felt it was going to shorten the war and I was very pleased that we had been a part of that activity.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I understand there was a big party kind of atmosphere, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well, yeah, but, you know, everybody running up and down the Turnpike and yelling. That’s what we did.
Mr. Kolb: And the News Sentinel and all the newspapers blasted it all around.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: You know, it got to be kind of improper for you to even brag about – not brag, but even say anything about having helped win the war, and we’re supposed to feel guilty about having done that.
Mr. Kolb: You mean now or at that time?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No, when I was working, later, and so I got out these newspapers – you mentioned the newspapers – I got them out and I’ve made copies of them and I plastered them on the wall. Mr. Hibbs agreed with me, you know, that we can’t forget what happened. And we are not sorry one bit having participated in it.
Mr. Kolb: No, yeah. There was quite a relaxation I guess for a few days when the news was out.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, yeah. Well, that was the climax, of course, and we knew things were going to be different in the future.
Mr. Kolb: And it happened real kind of fast.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, too fast really.
Mr. Kolb: Y-12 went down.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, and K-25 and, of course, X-10, we kept them but they changed their focus a bit.
Mr. Kolb: You were still at K-25 all through the war, is that right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, I went to Y-12 about ’64, I believe.
Mr. Kolb: So K-25 –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: But I worked for the President out there, Larson, you know, and then he decided he wanted to be closer to the community because we were being nagged about contributing to the community and that kind of thing, and tried to do that. [inaudible] you know, the rest of my tenure. It was kind of routine.
Mr. Kolb: Larson made a fairly substantial contribution; he was a chemist for [inaudible].
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well he was at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory for a while I believe, or did some work with them. I don’t know. He came down here when Mr. Center had his nervous breakdown and he took over.
Mr. Kolb: That was at Union Carbide?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn. Then he left. I worked for him for about five years and he left and became a United States Commissioner, or D.C. Commissioner.
Mr. Kolb: Right, yeah, he had a very important career. He was with the calutrons.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Calutrons.
Mr. Kolb: With Lawrence Berkley Labs.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Did something with chemistry.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: So I think his son, Bob, still worked out in that area. He lost [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: So you went through the trauma of what’s going to happen to Oak Ridge right after the war, or course, not knowing what or how.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: If you wanted to stay here, you had to – we decided early on we wanted to stay here. [inaudible] else to add to it, it was a long, long experience. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Mr. Kolb: I guess not, including the gates opening in ’49 when things – that was a big change.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, it was. I remember when I came here, my mother sent my trunk and it ended up over here in a railroad station, they didn’t even know where Oak Ridge was, you know, it was just kept [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: In Knoxville somewhere you mean?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well it finally got over here and somebody called me and said it was over there. I had it bused over here or whatever. Oh, and those early dormitories too, you had no way of hanging your clothes or anything, you just spread them out on a chair until you could get hangers. Oh, and I remember I thought, here I was – see, I had graduated from college when I was twenty. That was pretty young, and I came up here and I thought, I have to be careful about my associations, you know. I pretty much stayed by myself or I interacted with the girls that had come from my school. But I remember this one girl approaching me and saying [inaudible] at the skating rink after dinner and stay a long time and I thought, I believe I won’t do that. So I don’t know, they might have thought I was snobbish, but I don’t think so. You just have to be careful.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you say you went to dinner. Was that a cafeteria?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Cafeteria, in fact it was that same one that I was telling you about at Jefferson, you know. But you had to walk all the way where those little houses are now on the left going up the Turnpike, my first dormitory was there and then I moved to West Village and then to Bayon Hall. It’s right where that bank that’s unoccupied is located now. I didn’t ever get involved with the skating rink. But I felt maybe I was too young to get involved in something like that. But we had, you remember, tennis court dances in the beginning.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, Bill Pollock pipes in music, yeah.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And I remember six –
[Side B]
Mrs. Kirstowsky: – not really significant, but about six of us would go over together and we all came home together, too. But I remember one night this Polish boy asked me to dance and he wanted to do the polka, and I danced with him a lot, that polka, all night and I remember I could hardly get out of bed the next morning. I didn’t even know how to do the polka too much; that was not in my background. But doing that on a concrete slab was not fun.
Mr. Kolb: But you did it.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh, sure, when you’re young you’ll do anything like that.
Mr. Kolb: You said the tennis court, was that the –
Mrs. Kirstowsky: That was at Jefferson.
Mr. Kolb: Jefferson Tennis Court, right.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: There was four there or something like that, but that’s where –and sort of a harmless activity, too, if you were in mass.
Mr. Kolb: How often were those tennis court dances held? Just on the weekends?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: As I remember it, Friday and Saturday night or something like that. I don’t remember participating in any. I think it was Saturday night if we ever went down there.
Mr. Kolb: During the summertime, when it was warmer.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Other times the dances were in the rec halls, inside in the wintertime.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: How about the movie theater? Ever go to the movie theaters?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yes. Let me see. When Grove was, do you remember when it was opened? The Grove Theatre was an early one. I can’t remember how soon it opened, but we went there. We’d go into Knoxville in a group.
Mr. Kolb: The Tennessee Theatre?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: [inaudible] we loved, yeah. Didn’t have television then, you know.
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. Didn’t need it. Didn’t know what you were missing.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well, there was plenty to do if you just kept your nose clean and didn’t get into trouble.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Oh my, and most of the time you worked so hard, you know, during daytime, you didn’t really want to do anything at night except get ready for the next day.
Mr. Kolb: Exhausting, mentally exhausting, not just physically.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, that’s right. Our activity was pretty much confined to the weekend. Of course, we rode to work in those big old cattle cars, you know, where you sat around.
Mr. Kolb: The one’s they brought down from Chicago?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I don’t know where they got them, but you stood up most of the time. I still remember trying to read the paper standing up.
Mr. Kolb: Bouncing along.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: And not really thinking anything about it, you know, that there could be a better way of doing it.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been told that the bus system in Oak Ridge at that time was the 6th or 7th largest in the United States.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I’m not surprised. There was one here at West Village and then the Central Bus Terminal. We couldn’t have made it without those buses. Of course, that wasn’t involved in our contract; that was another.
Mr. Kolb: We’ve about exhausted the things I wanted to talk about Mary Grace.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: I’m afraid I haven’t covered them adequately and perhaps injected some things that you’re not interested in at all.
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s summarize by, I guess you said, and you believe, that Oak Ridge is a unique community. What makes it unusual or unique in your mind?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Well I think that, in general, the people here are extremely intelligent. I think more than you would find in a normal community. Also patriotic, and the desire to build the wonderful town; they formed all these activities that were official and entertaining like the Playhouse. I think we were quite active in the Playhouse and always have been. And we early on picked out the areas that we wanted to concentrate on and made contributions to them through the years. I think people here are a little more innovative than my hometown.
Mr. Kolb: How big was your hometown?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: About fifteen thousand.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so it was not small.
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah. I remember our pastor at the Lutheran church said he was so frightened to come here because of all the intelligent people; he finished at the top of his seminary, at the top of his class, but he said that in board meetings at the church, somebody would make a statement and all these guys would pull out their slide rule and say, “Let’s see, now if we do this.” He said he was intimidated by that crew, and most of them were Ph.D.s. Many of them were. He learned to love them because they were so different.
Mr. Kolb: What was his name?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Crumley. He went on to be the Bishop of the Lutheran Church of America. In fact we have two former pastors that became bishops. Fenaway became the Bishop of Florida not too long ago. We feel quite fortunate in having such outstanding men work with us here.
Mr. Kolb: There is a lot of legacy that we try to keep up, I guess you might say, right?
Mrs. Kirstowsky: Yeah, yeah.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Well thank you, Mary Grace, you’ve been very generous with your thoughts and we appreciate your information.
[end of recording]